The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen: The Heroine the World Needs Right Now

In The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen embarks on a hero’s journey armed only with her bow, her arrow and her wits: She must survive a televised death match against 23 other young people if she’s to return home and continue hunting to provide food for her family. But in the real world, the character Katniss Everdeen faces an even greater challenge: Proving that pop culture will embrace a heroine capable of holding her own with the big boys.

It’s a battle fought on two fronts. First, The Hunger Games must bring in the kind of box office numbers that prove to Hollywood that a film led by a young female heroine who’s not cast as a sex symbol can bring in audiences. And second, for Katniss to truly triumph, she must embody the type of female heroine — smart, tough, compassionate — that has been sorely lacking in the popular culture landscape for so very long.

“There’s a glass ceiling cinematically…. They’ll say women don’t want to see action or men don’t want to see women. And I’m like, ‘Men don’t want to see women? Ninety percent of us really do!'”

Hitting a bull’s-eye at the box office would be momentous because it would prove that a major motion picture starring a female hero (in this case played by Jennifer Lawrence, who Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers noted “gives us a female warrior worth cheering“) can bring in as much money as any Thor ($65.7 million opening weekend) or Iron Man ($98 million). Such a strong opening could turn heads and change minds in Hollywood, where female superheroes rarely get considered.

“There’s a glass ceiling cinematically,” The Avengers director Joss Whedon, a man known for his strong female characters, said in an interview with Wired last week at South by Southwest. “There is not a major studio that is out there that is trying to make a movie about a female superhero. They’ll say, ‘This is guy stuff.’ They’ll say women don’t want to see action or men don’t want to see women. And I’m like, ‘Men don’t want to see women? Ninety percent of us really do!'”

Granted, Katniss Everdeen isn’t a traditional superhero — she possesses no special power and didn’t come from a comic book — but her success could pave the way for those that are. Provided the film remains as true to the book as early clips and filmmaker comments have suggested, the movie could prove revolutionary for portraying a true female hero who is emotionally and physically strong, and isn’t romantically involved with a male hero counterpart. (Katniss also doesn’t fall into the troubling pattern of women in action movies who sacrifice themselves, like Trinity’s death in the Matrix trilogy, or Wolverine killing Jean Gray in X-Men: The Last Stand.)

(Spoiler alert: Minor details and plot points follow.)

For those who haven’t read Collins’ young-adult novels, here’s the gist of Katniss Everdeen’s hero CV: Her father died when she was very young and her mother was a bit of hot mess thereafter, leaving Katniss to provide for her family. To do so (and to avoid selling her body for food) she began hunting — a survival skill that makes her an excellent markswoman. In the future dystopia in which she lives, what was North America is now called Panem and has been divided into 12 Districts controlled by a ruthless Capitol located near present-day Denver. Each year, as retaliation for a previous attempt at rebellion by the poor, the Capitol randomly selects a boy and a girl from each District to compete in the Hunger Games and fight to the death in a gruesome reality television show that the oppressed are forced to watch live.

Katniss is the chosen girl — they’re called Tributes — from District 12. Her struggle to come to grips with the option of using her archery skills to survive the Games and continue feeding her family or kill other poor children she has no beef with is the emotional thrust of the tale. (In a prescient moment that probably got her the part, Lawrence told the movie’s director, Gary Ross, during her audition, “Please remember that after Katniss shoots a bow and kills someone, her face cannot be badass.” She added in an interview with Vanity Fair, “She’s a hunter but not a killer.”) Her actions in the Games — that hand gesture you’ve seen her make in the trailer means a lot more than “Holla atcha girl!” in Panem — turn her into something of an accidental revolutionary. Suddenly, the Girl On Fire (she’s from the District that mines coal) sparks something bigger than herself.

Her brain is as sharp as the arrows in her quiver and her heroism isn’t necessarily something that’s played up as sexy.

Throughout the book series, Katniss exemplifies what sociologist Kathryn Gilpatric calls a “true action heroine” — a rare sort of character in Gilpatric’s studies. In essence, she’s not a heroine because she fights next to a male hero — in fact she feels compelled to protect the boy Tribute from her District, Peeta (played by Josh Hutcherson in the film). Her brain is as sharp as the arrows in her quiver — she outsmarts the Gamemakers more than once — and her heroism isn’t necessarily something that’s played up as sexy. (Lawrence is a beautiful girl, but she’s a good Katniss because she’s an incredibly multifaceted actress, not because she looks good holding a weapon in spandex.)

“I think Katniss really breaks down gender stereotypes,” Gilpatric said in an e-mail to Wired. “[At one point in the book] she stares in the mirror and tries to remember who she is and [says] the presence of Peeta’s arm around her shoulders ‘feels alien.’ It’s a great line that really captures her strong sense of self and undermines stereotypes of female dependency.”

At first glance, The Hunger Games may seem like young-adult fluff, what with the female lead, the two male leads and packs of screaming teen fans, but at least at this turn those teen fans are screaming for something that might actually turn out to be empowering (love you, Bella Swan, but you’re kind of milquetoast). In a study published in 2010 in the journal Sex Roles, Gilpatric examined the way female action heroines were treated in films with an eye on determining how those representations can inform gender stereotypes in popular culture. Looking at 157 different heroines in films released from 1991 to 2005 (though Sigourney Weaver’s Lt. Ripley in 1979’s Alien is cited as an archetype for a positive heroine) and found that only 15.3 percent were depicted as the main heroine and a depressing 58.6 percent were presented as being submissive to the male hero. She also found that 30 percent of them died by the end of the film, 47 percent were evil characters, who died for their crimes, and many died disturbing, heart-wrenching deaths. No wonder girl geeks feel they have so few ladies to look up to, most of them are dead.

“The violent female action character is a recent addition to contemporary American cinema and has the potential to redefine female heroines, for better or worse.”

“The [violent female action character] is a recent addition to contemporary American cinema and has the potential to redefine female heroines, for better or worse,” Gilpatric wrote in her study. “This research provides evidence that the majority of female action characters shown in American cinema are not empowering images, they do not draw on their femininity as a sources of power, and they are not a kind of ‘post woman’ operating outside the boundaries of gender restrictions.”

Katniss Everdeen arguably does, and it’s not a total coincidence: Since Collins set her books in the future, it doesn’t seem so out of place that a 16-year-old girl would think she could do everything a young man her age could — presumably gender equality has advanced in the intervening years (think of Starbuck’s swagger in the modern Battlestar Galactica). Also, Collins came up with The Hunger Games after a night spent flipping channels between reality television and footage of the Iraq war. And when her agent once suggested she not kill off a beloved, innocent young character, she replied flatly, “This is not a fairy tale; it’s a war, and in war, there are tragic losses that must be mourned.”

That level of brutality in Collins’ books gives them a gravity that could make them inspirational on other fronts. Katniss’ actions in the Hunger Games arena that inspire a revolution in the book and movie could easily been seen as a future, fictional version of the leadership of Asmaa Mahfouz, an April 6 Youth Movement founder who posted a video online calling young women to flood the streets of Cairo to protest Hosni Mubarak’s rule in Egypt last year. Her call worked: Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, men and women, joined the movement and Mubarak stepped down in early February 2011, just weeks after Mahfouz posted her video.

“Occupy should adopt the Mockingjay symbol.”

While Katniss Everdeen is a fictional character, not a real-life revolutionary like Mahfouz, it’s not inconceivable that young people could read her tale and be inspired to sociopolitical involvement (or at least not feel intimidated to investigate a cause they believe in). Even the film’s stars acknowledge the political potency of the Hunger Games film — Hutcherson noted in a recent interview there were parallels between the story and the real-world “disconnect between the people who run the country and the people who live in the country” — and an astute commenter on this very blog even recently noted “Occupy should adopt the Mockingjay symbol.” (The Mockingjay is the result of cross-breeding between mockingbirds and genetically engineered jabberjays, which were created by the Capitol to spy on rebels, who simply fed the flying moles lies. The existence of the birds is an in-joke in the Districts, a failure of the Capitol that’s easy to, well, mock. The symbol becomes a logo of revolution after Katniss wears a Mockingjay pin in the arena during the Games.)

Having the main character from a young adult novel be the new face of the Occupy movement or the Arab Spring may be a stretch — she’s no Guy Fawkes, after all — but young women reading a series of books and opting to care about something can’t be a bad thing. Also, the self-empowerment inherent in young women identifying as Team Katniss instead of, say, Team Edward or Team Jacob is extremely refreshing.

Katniss’ possible ripple effect on the movie industry and the wider culture will depend, at least in part, on how well the film does when it is released in theaters this weekend. As Drew Goddard, director of upcoming horror-comedy The Cabin in the Woods (and a former Buffy the Vampire Slayer writer) told Wired, Hollywood execs look at what did or didn’t work in the last year, and their business-driven observations quickly become conventional wisdom. If a female-led movie like Hunger Games underperforms, the weak box office will be used as an excuse not to make similar films. But he’s hopeful heroines will re-emerge.

“These things are cyclical, they will come back,” Goddard said. “But it’s unfortunate that we have to battle against that.”

Perhaps in the future, the cycle will stop and audiences can expect an annual superheroine summer blockbuster as much as they expect any other popcorn flick. In documentary Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines, director Kristy Guevara-Flanigan traced the impact Wonder Woman had on whole generations of women, from the 1960s to the Riot Grrrls of the 1990s. The impact of the Amazonian superhero’s existence proved incredibly far-reaching — and that’s just one comic book character.

“Girls actually need superheroes much more than boys, when you come right down to it.”

“I think when you’re little, and looking at people’s knees, you’re so powerless and so unequal that it’s really helpful to be able to think yourself into someone who is powerful,” activist Gloria Steinem says in the documentary. “Girls actually need superheroes much more than boys, when you come right down to it … and what’s revolutionary, of course, is to have a female protector, not a male protector.”

Steinem was speaking of the importance of Wonder Woman, but she could just as easily have been speaking of Katniss Everdeen. And, as the culminating montage of Wonder Women! shows, Katniss is just one of a few powerful young female characters who have surfaced in recent years (hacktivist Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Hit Girl also get nods). But Guevara-Flanigan’s money is on Katniss.

“I’m thinking The Hunger Games, probably,” she told Wired when asked what the next great heroine story would be.

The answer to whether Katniss Everdeen becomes the heroine pop culture needs and deserves isn’t very far off — midnight screenings of the film begin Thursday night — but for the sake of girl geeks everywhere, let’s hope the odds remain ever in her favor.